Stop the H1-B Bashing

By N. Sivakumar |
Posted 10-04-2004

CNN news anchor Lou Dobbs probably doesn't know that there are millions of immigrant techies living in the United States, inventing great things, spawning great startups and creating millions of American jobs. But what about average viewers? Do they believe everything he says? They must, judging from anti-outsourcing Web sites that are flooded with hostileespecially anti-Indianmessages.

I respect Dobbs' concern for the American middle class. I agree that even though free trade has proven benefits, we can't ship all the jobs overseas. A country is made up of people, not buildings and corporations. But Dobbs and others see only one side of the H1-B visathe very visa that allowed me to come to this great country to rediscover myself.

Consider the benefits due to these foreigners who came to the United States, many of them on H1-B visas: Sameer Bhatia, who founded Hotmail; Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google; Alfred S. Chuang, who founded BEA Systems; Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; Vinod Dham, who designed the Pentium chip; Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux; Anders Hejlsberg, who architected the C# language; and James Gosling, who developed the Java language. Does Dobbs know the number of jobs that were created due to the efforts of these people?